Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Unnecessary References: Marketing even within the IDE?
Charles Petzold has articulated well one of the concerns that I've had about embracing some of the new time and code saving features of Visual Studio 2005. In short form Petzold charges that the dev environment becomes controlling, forcing developers to embrace less than optimal coding practices in favor of coding speed.
I think that his article leads credence to a comment a co-worker made recently that .net practitioners tend to be less deeply grounded -- or at least less deeply practiced -- in solid OO principles. With the development environment eliminating so much of the thought behind software development, it seems that we tend to drift in the direction of least resistence.
One particular comment that Petzold made spawned a thought on a parallel track with him. Under the heading Generated Code Petzold notes that VS includes generates references to unneeded namespaces/assemblies when generating a project. "These extra references don’t do any real harm except if someone else examines the program — perhaps to make some changes after the original programmer has moved on — and assumes that the application requires these references."
I wonder if these extra references are simply a means by which to further secure VS/MS dominance in the market place. As Petzold alludes, the presence of the references suggests that they may be necessary. This may cause the initial developer to start pondering their use which, in turn, will spawn their use in other places. Is it any wonder that System.Collections.Generic is one of the references that VS.2005 includes? Not when it Generics also makes the front page of the IDE as one of the hot new topics in VS.2005, etc. If MS views Generics as a leg up on Java and other platforms then it will be widely promoted even within the IDE.
I think that his article leads credence to a comment a co-worker made recently that .net practitioners tend to be less deeply grounded -- or at least less deeply practiced -- in solid OO principles. With the development environment eliminating so much of the thought behind software development, it seems that we tend to drift in the direction of least resistence.
One particular comment that Petzold made spawned a thought on a parallel track with him. Under the heading Generated Code Petzold notes that VS includes generates references to unneeded namespaces/assemblies when generating a project. "These extra references don’t do any real harm except if someone else examines the program — perhaps to make some changes after the original programmer has moved on — and assumes that the application requires these references."
I wonder if these extra references are simply a means by which to further secure VS/MS dominance in the market place. As Petzold alludes, the presence of the references suggests that they may be necessary. This may cause the initial developer to start pondering their use which, in turn, will spawn their use in other places. Is it any wonder that System.Collections.Generic is one of the references that VS.2005 includes? Not when it Generics also makes the front page of the IDE as one of the hot new topics in VS.2005, etc. If MS views Generics as a leg up on Java and other platforms then it will be widely promoted even within the IDE.
